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It's only arrogance if you're wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.
Simone de Beauvoir
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You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To show your true ability is always, in a sense, to surpass the limits of your ability, to go a little beyond them: to dare, to seek, to invent; it is at such a moment that new talents are revealed, discovered, and realized.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
Simone de Beauvoir
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When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
Simone de Beauvoir -
Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
Simone de Beauvoir -
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
Simone de Beauvoir -
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Simone de Beauvoir -
We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
Simone de Beauvoir -
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
Simone de Beauvoir -
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
Simone de Beauvoir -
All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
Simone de Beauvoir